Confusion! Anger! Shame! Acceptance! Frankie C.'s Excellent Adventure

Wednesday night was an absolute train crash of a night and I woke up Thursday morning around 9 a.m. I felt dehydrated and sluggish, but thankfully I managed to escape a pounding headache.

I wanted to go get some coffee and blog about the night. I got dressed and found my room key and the cash from my pocket the night before but I can’t find my wallet anywhere.

BOOM! There’s the headache! My stomach is in knots and my head is now pounding. My wallet is gone. I’d like to tell you that a bunch of nightmare scenarios ran through my mind but I can’t. My mind is mush. I’m catatonic. I’m paralyzed with shock and anger at myself.

I run down to the lobby and get a cup of coffee. I see Kerry when I get down there. Our conversation goes like this.

That’s Kerry, a source of boundless emotional support. I get my coffee and return to the room. I figure, before I call and kill my cards I should retrace my steps and see if I can locate it. The issue is that my steps were pretty much all over the city.

Like the ancient Asian wisdom says, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I strongly doubt whoever said that competed in a hurricane chugging contest the night before. Be that as it may, I get a sweatshirt and some jeans on and prepare to walk back down to the French quarter to see if my wallet is at the Hustler club.

I know that I had it there, because they made me show my license to get in. I get out into the sunlight and I feel like a vampire. It’s surface-of-the-sun bright. All I want to do is find a hole to crawl into.

It’s probably a half mile to the French quarter from the hotel, if feels like light years. I make my way down Royal Street and see two fairly attractive young ladies stumble out from a bar, knock over a trash can and then snap pictures of them hugging each other on the corner. It’s 10 am. I cross over a connecting street to Bourbon and head over to the Hustler club.

As I approach the door it occurs to me that they might not be open yet. I relax a bit when I see the door open a crack.

I reach the door and open it a bit more when out of the darkness inside the club a guy emerges to block my entry.

I explained to the man that I’d lost my wallet and my license and all my access to any money and how nervous that made me about the flight home and the rest of my trip and if I could just take a look around I could hopefully find it and…

He slammed the door in my face and muttered, “We open at twelve.”

I weighed the pros and cons of returning to the hotel vs. staying on Bourbon St. and I was just too lazy to walk all the way back to the hotel and with my new “No Money” vacation, I wasn’t spending 10 bucks each way to take a cab. I head to the jazz park and get a coffee and muffin for breakfast.

Another really cool thing about Bourbon St. is that even at 10am. You can find live music being played. I get a spot far enough from the stage that I won’t feel too much like a scumbag for not tipping the musicians. I know they’ll never read this, but hey I really wanted to tip you. You two were great.

Twelve o’clock finally rolls around and I walk back to the club. The door isn’t open yet. I lean on a post across the street and wait. And wait. And wait.

At twelve thirty the doors of the Hustler club open and I’m finally allowed in where I tell my story to a young girl who doesn’t appear to be the sympathetic type.

The young lady says she’s going to look in the office for me as soon as the door man gets there to watch the door. Ten minutes later the door man shows up and the young lady takes off.

I waited for an hour. She never came back. Some days are better than others. This day was one of the others. The door man took my phone # and promised to call if the wallet turned up.

It was almost 2:30 pm when I returned from my total waste of time and I found Kerry and Bill are out at the convention center. I have the hotel room to myself. I have to call and cancel all my cards. My head has been pounding for almost six hours at this time.

I get all my calls taken care of and I take some ibuprofen and Excedrine and lie down. Kerry comes in ten minutes later and starts to work. I have work of my own to finish up, so I get up again.

It’s about 4 pm and I still haven’t eaten since I ate that muffin down on Bourbon St. Kerry and I shoot down the street to Butcher which is a butcher shop and deli. They make a hell of a sandwich there.

I’m feeling much better at this point. It is what it is, about the wallet. We’ll get through it. Besides, there’s great news. The Davio’s folks have hit town and we’re going to have dinner with them at Shula’s steak house owned by great Miami Dolphins head coach Don Shula.

We have a couple hours to kill so I finish working on the blog and get a little rest. 7 pm comes and we start to pull it together for the night. We meet up in the lobby Butch Stearns, Nick Saber and Jay Hajj.

We all grab a cab downtown and hook up with the Davio’s crew at the JW Marriot hotel. We have an 8 o’clock reservation. We sit down and we’re all having fun laughing and joking. It got so boisterous at some points that we got admonished by the wait staff to keep it down.

My meal was great but unluckily they did screw up a couple of the steaks. So, not everyone was as satisfied with the meal as I was, but I think the company made up for the poor performance of the restaurant. I had two vodka cocktails and two glasses of wine with dinner.

After dinner we hit Bourbon Street again. It was a lot wilder than it had been on Tuesday or Wednesday. The Super Bowl fever has begun! Or, it might just be another Thursday in New Orleans. I’m leaning toward the latter.

The whole group of us are walking and in some cases dancing down the street having a blast. We wind up back at Pat O’Brien’s. We have been launching out of there every night so far. Those hurricanes are insane.

I decide to follow protocol and order a hurricane just like the previous two nights. The hurricane arrives and I take a sip. It’s not awesome. In fact, I think I’m officially hurricane’d out. I try to power through. We’re all still having a blast.

We weave our way through O’Brien’s and find a spot inside opposite the piano bar room. Traci from Wednesday night is there and our party is even bigger now. Bad news for me, my stomach is on fire. I can’t drink any more of this God awful hurricane and the room we’re in seems uncomfortably hot.

I decided right there I was calling it a night. Thursday had its downs but finished on a relatively high note. I wanted to get out while the getting was good. I hailed a cab back to the hotel and got into bed.

Big day on Friday. The FootballNation.com party at Barcadia at 601 Tchoupitoulas St. in the Warehouse district. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, stop by!